Principal investigator:
Eva Wittenberg
I am interested in how the mind assembles meaning, how this capacity came to be, and how it interacts with other cognitive abilities. I investigate the decisions that speakers face when they wrap their messages in grammar. Speakers make structural choices dozens of times per day, and listeners rapidly process them, make inferences about why something was said in a particular way, and create a representation of the speaker’s intended meaning in their minds.
Here is a short CV (email me for a comprehensive one).
Postdoc fellows:
Natalia Jardon
My research interests are primarily connected to the domain of events in language and cognition, and more specifically to the question of whether linguistically well-established primitives such as stativity and change are cognitively available beyond language. I have been working as a postdoctoral researcher at CEU since 2023.
Anna Alexandra Kamenetski
My research interests revolve around language and event cognition, more specifically how grammar affects the way speakers of different languages perceive, describe, and process various types of events. I use a broad range of methodologies, including EEG and eyetracking. I started my postdoctoral researcher position at CEU with the project LISA in January 2025. Within this project, I focus on neural correlates of social event processing.
PhD students:
Elena Marx
In general, my research focuses on questions at the interface of event perception and language. I am interested in how temporal relations between events are perceived, how such relations are encoded by language, and what the preconditions in temporal and event cognition are to understand and represent sequential relations between events. In this regard, I am looking into the developmental aspects of event cognition. I started my PhD program at CEU in Fall 2021.
Oliwia Iwan
My background is in general and comparative linguistics and philosophy. For my M.A. project at the University of Vienna, I investigated temporal structures in Polish relative clauses with past-under-past tense.My research project investigates how phrase structure, semantic characteristics of adjective classes, as well as interlocuters’ subtle pragmatic cues inform the mapping of linguistic attributes onto perceptual representations. I began my PhD program at CEU in Fall 2023.
Xueyi Yao (Icey)
I am generally interested in questions about event perception, event memory, and language. My PhD work explores how language reconstructs memories of events. I started my PhD program at CEU in 2023 Fall.
Ebru Evcen (based at UC San Diego)
Broadly speaking, I am interested in the issues at the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics cross-linguistically. My research focuses on how, as language unfolds, we incrementally build representations of the events described by that unfolding language and how speakers develop a sufficiently rich linguistic meaning during comprehension. Currently, I am looking at how people interpret counterfactuals.
Visiting students:
Anna Viola Sáfrány
I am a student in the Middle European interdisciplinary master's program in Cognitive Science with an academic background in linguistics, literature and translation. My research interests include the neural correlates of meaning-making and semantic violations as well as the social and political aspects of psycholinguistics. I am joining the Language Comprehension Lab in October 2024 to work on my master’s thesis as part of the LISA project and to gain experience in empirical research.
Štěpán Hřebíček
I am an intern in the lab. I am a third-year Psychology student from Masaryk University in Brno. I am interested in cognitive sciences as a whole, namely consciousness, perception, memory and language. I am joining the Language Comprehension Lab in May 2025 to gain empirical research experience.
Staff:
Attila Balla
I am a psychologist and a political scientist, and alumni member of CEU. I am generally interested in political psychology, political communication, and voting behavior. I am currently a PhD student at the social psychology program of Masaryk University and member of the Brno Lab of Intergroup Processes at the Czech Academy of Sciences. I have been working as the lab manager of the Language Comprehension Lab since June 2022.
Tiziana Srdoc
I am a Psychology graduate, currently studying Cognitive Science at the University of Vienna. I am interested in the developmental and evolutionary origins of language, and its interplay with cognition. For my master’s thesis, I am investigating the brain regions involved in the production and comprehension of object labels in 3-year-old children. I have been working as a research assistant at CEU since March 2024.